George Guimarães' shared items in Google Reader

Luz, 3D e o tempo em que Blade Runner era ficção

2011-10-24T13:13:37Z

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs from Kevin Karsch on Vimeo.

Todo mundo adora sacanear as cenas dos seriados onde o geek de plantão (sem mouse) tecla furiosamente ampliando, aplicando algoritmos e criando interfaces GUI em Visual BASIC para rastrear IPs de criminosos, mas em Blade Runner ninguém encosta. A cena clássica em que Deckard investiga a foto da Zhora ampliando, enhançando e girando em 3D.

Isso, claro, é impossível, certo? Mais ou menos, diriam Kevin Karsch, Varsha Hedau, David Forsyth e Derek Hoiem, pesquisadores que apresentaram um paper de título “Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs” na SIGGRAPH Asia 2011.

No software que criaram para provar o conceito uma imagem 2D fixa é mapeada e a geometria é inferida de algumas poucas dicas do operador. Objetos são introduzidos e a iluminação da cena é também de forma automática deduzida.

O resultado é simples mas impressionante, nem dá pra começar a imaginar como isso será usado no cinema, TV publicidade e sextapes no futuro. Assistam, vale cada minuto!

Jacaré - para a 317 Band 80

2011-10-22T03:12:00Z

Apesar do quórum nulo, logaritmicamente falando, fui testar e aprovar o Jacaré, um boteco já estabelecido na V Madalena há 4 lustros. Apesar de mais recente que a 317 Bandeirantes 1980, depois que o Bartolo fechou é um dos mais antigos do pedaço. Frequentei outrora com a Susanna, quando éramos jovens apaixonados.

Sem empinar ares, é sempre bem procurado por uma clientela variada. O ambiente é correto, o som não ensurdece embora tenha mais volume que melodia.

A comida de bar é caprichada. Pedi uma alheira, afinal hoje é shabbat. Servida de forma apropriada: acompanhada de pão, molho de cebola, farofa, ovo, e verdura, de forma que comer no bar não significa abrir mão de uma refeição saudável. O contrário do que se vê em estabelecimentos voltados para um público emergente ou em bairros nouveau riche, onde a clientela tende a deglutir quase que exclusivamente alimentos outrora considerados de maior prestígio pelas pessoas que tem a necessidade de afirmar seu status através da mesa - nesses as porções são compostas quase que exclusivamente por carne.

Se optarem pelo Jacaré para o próximo evento, só não recomendo a Brahma Extra, uma cerveja meio aguada, sem arestas, de sabor pouco definido, mais ao gosto de emergentes que tentam imitar os sabores padronizados norte-americanos ou talvez alemães. A Brahma comum tem um sabor característico de antigamente, e deve ser preferida em qualquer ocasião.

O Jacaré continua movimentado após a virar a madrugada. A noite está bonita, eu voltei para casa.

X11

2011-10-12T19:24:11Z

Shared by George Guimarães
that's why I bought a Mac

Geeks

2011-10-10T21:08:19Z

Updated: Typo fixed. Thanks to all!

Rock in road

2011-10-05T02:16:41Z

Da série “Como acabar com o estresse no trânsito”…

Bem melhor que aquela buzininha, né não?

Enviado por Ciron Franco de Sá.

Comic for September 27, 2011

2011-09-27T19:21:53Z

Shared by George Guimarães
best evah!

Procurando o salvador

2011-09-18T15:00:28Z

E assim nasceu a páscoa!

Procurando o salvador é um artigo originalmente publicado no ((( TRETA ))).

11. September, 2011

2011-09-10T23:00:00Z

11. September, 2011

Simply Explained

2011-09-06T22:24:47Z

Anjo da guarda

2011-08-16T16:49:14Z

Perdeu, bichano!

Anjo da guarda é um artigo originalmente publicado no ((( TRETA ))).

Notícias que vão mudar o mundo (parte 572 ″ fechou a rodinha)

2011-08-11T23:48:36Z

Ícone do axé, Sarajane diz que encerrou a carreira

***

Feliz 1987 para você também!

Little Geeks

2011-08-09T21:30:56Z

July 15, 2011: Stale Links

2011-07-15T15:35:41Z

The problem with sitting on these daily link posts is that the links go out of date. Sigh. Here are some links.

Twitter

I found a couple of things about this InfoQ article about Twitter’s infrastructure odd. I was expecting it to be a bit more of a Rails hit-piece, frankly, so it was nice to see a quote like this one from Evan Weaver:

I wouldn’t say that Rails has served as poorly in any way, it’s just that we outgrew it very quickly.

Twitter has unique needs, so it’s not surprising that the Rails stack doesn’t serve them anymore, but they did get pretty far with the Rails stack.

This was interesting – first, from Charles Humble, writing the article:

You might assume that the move to the JVM was largely driven by performance and scalability concerns, but in fact the existing Twitter codebase performs well… Rather, the move to JVM is driven as much by a need for better developer productivity as it it for better performance

And this from Weaver:

As we move into a light-weight Service Oriented Architecture model, static typing becomes a genuine productivity boon.

The author concludes the article with this:

[Rails] does however come with well known costs, both in terms of performance and scalability, and perhaps also the relative maturity of the libraries and tool chain. In addition, the experience at Twitter suggests that the Ruby on Rails stack can produce some significant architectural challenges as the code base grows.

Which strikes me as an overgeneralization of what Weaver said – I’m almost willing to believe that static typing is a benefit if you are doing SOA at Twitter’s scale, but I haven’t seen the benefit on smaller projects in my experience.

Amazon

As somebody who got their Amazon Affiliate account zapped when Amazon pulled the rug out from under Illinois residents, I was following with some interest the similar news out of California. (Although not quite identical, I had several months notice).

There’s been a little bit of confusion on what actually happened – a lot of people seem to think California is trying to tax affiliate revenue (I can’t find the link, but I saw someone argue that their affiliate revenue was already being taxed so shouldn’t be taxed again, which is wrong in a couple of different ways.) Slate magazine has a decent overview, which I’ll note I basically agree with on the substance of the issue.

Current law is that online transactions are only subject to sales tax if the company involved has a physical presence in the state. The California law defines “presence” to include any affiliates who get a payout – the affiliate revenue isn’t taxed as such, but the existence of an affiliate means that other Amazon transactions in California would be subject to California sales tax. Amazon responded to the law by canceling all their affiliates in California, as they did in Illinois, to avoid having to charge sales tax, and also to avoid having to calculate and manage sales tax, and also to avoid a court case that they might well lose.

Anyway, you may agree or disagree with the California law – though it doesn’t seem inherently any less silly than the various state laws that impose income taxes in visiting professional athletes. For my part, I don’t understand why the fact that Amazon has put themselves in a position where paying sales takes kills their business model should be my problem – I understand why there was an initial push not to charge sales tax on the internet, but I think the social benefit of privileging on line sales has probably passed. Even if you don’t agree with that argument, though, it’s hard for me to see how Amazon using their affiliates as pawns is the best or most responsible way for them to be advocating their case.

New additions to the workflow

I’ve got a couple of new writing workflow things to mention. There’s a new app in the Mac App Store called Marked, which is a classic “One Thing Well” deal. For $2.99, it’s basically a Markdown preview window, but has the very useful feature that it will live-update a file you are editing every time you save. So it’s basically adding MarsEdit’s preview window to any editor. It also makes it easy to copy the resulting HTML into the clipboard if you, say, want to post it to WordPress. It also lets you change the Markdown processor if you’d like. It’s nicely handy for $2.99.

On the iPad side, WriteRoom has finally been updated to a universal app. It’s effectively PlainText Pro – the same basic (pretty) layout with a couple of extra features. It’s got an easy to configure extra keyboard row, and a couple of other handy features. My main negative is that, when the app is in landscape mode it doesn’t use all the horizontal space for text, that’d be a useful option. One thing I like about it, relative to other editors is that it live-syncs with Dropbox, giving much more of a feel of directly editing the Dropbox file than the other editors that make you download the file locally and manually sync. Overall, though I like it.

I also tried out an iPad app called Daedalus, which has a very interesting UI metaphor but doesn’t really fit with the way I manage files. If you are willing to do all your notes and writing in it, though, the organization looks like it might be handy.

RubyMine 3.2

Quick mention that RubyMine 3.2 is out, with support for Rails 3.1 features like the asset pipeline and CoffeeScript. Mostly, I’m having some stability problems with it (it tends to freeze up for me), but the editor and its interaction with Rails continues to get better.

Avdi on Law of Demeter

Finally, speaking of things I thought I was going to disagree with, but wound up agreeing with almost completely (and also speaking of week-old links…), here’s Avdi Grimm on the Law of Demeter. Avdi comes down on the side of actually useful guidelines for managing chains of method calls.

Filed under: Amazon, iPad, Ruby, RubyMine, Twitter, Uncategorized

Campanha a favor da homofobia

2011-08-02T02:44:09Z

Argumentos surpreendentes ante aos quais somos obrigados a refletir. Assista até o final:

- – -

O Haznos é a favor do amor.

Campanha a favor da homofobia é um artigo originalmente publicado no ((( TRETA ))).

Proibido estacionar

2011-08-03T09:48:19Z

Na pequena e pacata cidade de ~~Miracema do Norte~~ Vilnius, na Lituânia, o digníssimo senhor prefeito adotou uma excelente medida para alertar que não importa o tipo de carro de carro e tão pouco quanta grana você tem, leis de estacionamento são para serem cumpridas.

Eu votaria nele.

—-

Dica do meu pai.

Proibido estacionar é um artigo originalmente publicado no ((( TRETA ))).

Interface Mocking

2011-07-30T05:45:00Z

UPDATE: This is a gem now: rspec-fire The code in the gem is better than that presented here.

Here is a screencast I put together in response to a recent Destroy All Software screencast on test isolation and refactoring, showing off an idea I’ve been tinkering around with for automatic validation of your implicit interfaces that you stub in tests.

Interface Mocking screencast.

Here is the code for InterfaceMocking:

module InterfaceMocking

  # Returns a new interface double. This is equivalent to an RSpec double,
  # stub or, mock, except that if the class passed as the first parameter
  # is loaded it will raise if you try to set an expectation or stub on
  # a method that the class has not implemented.
  def interface_double(stubbed_class, methods = {})
    InterfaceDouble.new(stubbed_class, methods)
  end

  module InterfaceDoubleMethods

    include RSpec::Matchers

    def should_receive(method_name)
      ensure_implemented(method_name)
      super
    end

    def should_not_receive(method_name)
      ensure_implemented(method_name)
      super
    end

    def stub!(method_name)
      ensure_implemented(method_name)
      super
    end

    def ensure_implemented(*method_names)
      if recursive_const_defined?(Object, @__stubbed_class__)
        recursive_const_get(Object, @__stubbed_class__).
          should implement(method_names, @__checked_methods__)
      end
    end

    def recursive_const_get object, name
      name.split('::').inject(Object) {|klass,name| klass.const_get name }
    end

    def recursive_const_defined? object, name
      !!name.split('::').inject(Object) {|klass,name|
        if klass && klass.const_defined?(name)
          klass.const_get name
        end
      }
    end

  end

  class InterfaceDouble < RSpec::Mocks::Mock

    include InterfaceDoubleMethods

    def initialize(stubbed_class, *args)
      args << {} unless Hash === args.last

      @__stubbed_class__ = stubbed_class
      @__checked_methods__ = :public_instance_methods
      ensure_implemented *args.last.keys

      # __declared_as copied from rspec/mocks definition of `double`
      args.last[:__declared_as] = 'InterfaceDouble'
      super(stubbed_class, *args)
    end

  end
end

RSpec::Matchers.define :implement do |expected_methods, checked_methods|
  match do |stubbed_class|
    unimplemented_methods(
      stubbed_class,
      expected_methods,
      checked_methods
    ).empty?
  end

  def unimplemented_methods(stubbed_class, expected_methods, checked_methods)
    implemented_methods = stubbed_class.send(checked_methods)
    unimplemented_methods = expected_methods - implemented_methods
  end

  failure_message_for_should do |stubbed_class|
    "%s does not publicly implement:\n%s" % [
      stubbed_class,
      unimplemented_methods(
        stubbed_class,
        expected_methods,
        checked_methods
      ).sort.map {|x|
        "  #{x}"
      }.join("\n")
    ]
  end
end

RSpec.configure do |config|

  config.include InterfaceMocking

end

Complexo de superioridade

2011-07-30T17:00:00Z

Critérios do Criacionismo:

- – -

Seja feliz em Um Sábado Qualquer.

Complexo de superioridade é um artigo originalmente publicado no ((( TRETA ))).

Good Coders

2011-07-24T21:08:33Z

Mindfuck na balada

2011-07-21T17:00:00Z

Cague tijolos:

Pronto, pode voltar a respirar.

- – -

Festa com bebida liberada sempre dá confusão.

Mindfuck na balada é um artigo originalmente publicado no ((( TRETA ))).

“sai da frente, guedes!”

2011-07-19T17:24:13Z

Um português, um skate e… anda, Guedes!

Não canso de rir assistindo a isso.

Enviado por Dinis Masgalos.